


Poetics: The Cybertonian Tradition

by TiamatsChild



Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Consent Issues, Gen, Metafiction, Multi, Quintessons - Freeform, document fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 14:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4750466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiamatsChild/pseuds/TiamatsChild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poetry, fiction, and criticism from Cybertron.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Poetics: The Cybertonian Tradition

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Dreamwidth, June 13th, 2010.

> **To Terazed**
> 
> The love of my sister is ever with me.  
>  Where she goes, I will follow.  
>  She takes me to the depths of the city, to the sky’s great height. 
> 
> The trade to which she turns her hand, I too will learn.  
>  The foundation she lays, I will lay beside her.  
>  Our roads are one road, our works one work:  
>  my name will mingle with hers through all the ages of our lives. 
> 
> **Ceti Alpha**   
> 

_From: “Words for Building the Road: An Anthology of Cybertonian Poetry”, Edited and Translated by Autobot Smokescreen and Dr. Choi Haneul, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1996_

  
  
  


> Ceti Alpha was perhaps the most prolific of the pre-modern poets. His partnership with Gamma Terazed, the architect and engineer, is widely regarded as one of the most fruitful artistic relationships in Cybertonian history. 

_Biographical information from “Poetics: An Introduction to the Cybertonian Tradition” by Pilcrow, circa the Second Golden Age._

  
  
  


> **Love Song After Ceti Alpha**
> 
> Oh, my beloved, my brother, I have longed to hold you.  
>  You have sent me away with bombs and with blows.  
>  Still I turn to you, age after age after age.  
>  Let us be of one core again,  
>  let me embrace you with all the gentleness of strength. 
> 
> **Proxenos**   
> 

_From the archive at Lightfingers Hollow, a former port on the shore of the Rust Sea. Dated with some certainty to near the end of the Second Great War._

  
  
  


> …While it is impossible to date “To Terazed” with absolute confidence, as all the copies that survive are not originals, the structure of the poem indicates that it is an early composition, probably written shortly after Ceti Alpha’s entry into the independence movement. In our time this type of poem is common, a conventional courting gift for mechanisms attempting to establish permanent bonds of whatever variation. Imagine, then, how revolutionary this poem was at the time it was created, written by a young person embarking on the first free relationship of his life while still considered disposable property by a system that punished demonstrations of sapience with death. Under these circumstances his vow to follow his sister for love of her and the sake of their partnership is not a rote imitation of ancient forms, but a bold and intensely political statement of self-determination and the right to community… 

_Fragment from the Fifth Autobot Archive, believed to be a section of Skytower’s essay “In Defense of Poetry”, written near the end of the First Golden Age._

  
  
  


> He saw her for the first time when she came to the factory, her hands behind her broad back, leaning down to listen to the Quint who drifted beside her, lecturing in rambling circuits of half looped logic abut support structures. “Pay attention!” his friend hissed, beside him, when he looked too long. “You’ll make a mistake.”
> 
> It was true, and so he had turned his gaze from her, and tried to turn his mind from the way she moved, dauntless and strong, bent only in courtesy, not in submission. He had never seen anyone move like her. He wanted to watch her move forever. He wanted to see her work, wanted to work beside her, wanted to bow his head to her and feel her hand on the back of his neck – if she touched him that way it would be a gesture of connection, of friendship, not of mastery and thoughtless domination. 
> 
> He didn’t expect he would ever see her again. 
> 
> But there she was, when his long shift was over, standing beside the back doors to the factory, her head held high, her hands twisted together behind her back. “I almost thought you wouldn’t come,” she said.
> 
> He shook, tiny tremors cascading through his joints, through every small servo and wire. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to keep you waiting.” 
> 
> “It’s all right,” she said, and brought her hands out from behind her back. She was trembling too. She was so much larger and stronger and braver than he was, and she was trembling too.
> 
> He went to her. 
> 
> (And he went to her, again and again and again, every day he lived, every day she was there to go to, and his mind sang bright with it, with her and with her being there, and with the light of what they were together, two people, making a choice, again and again and again.) 

_From Aerodyne's historical novel "Emancipation League", written in the early First Golden Age, lost since the Second Great War, rediscovered by Autobot Red Alert and Autobot Moraine._

  
  
  


> **Untitled**
> 
> My beloved’s shadow is cool and broad.  
>  I walk within it gladly. 
> 
> **Anon., sometimes attributed to Ceti Alpha**   
> 


End file.
